[nilkn]

It's a ridiculous term which I suppose is supposed to make people feel less guilty about having extremely comfortable, high paying, and overall relatively easy jobs, when they know that millions of others are struggling in jobs they hate, are drastically underpaid, or can't even find jobs.

A common version of this is to complain about a lack of vacation time (even though you have 4 weeks, plus holidays, plus sick time, plus sometimes getting to work from home), as if struggling menial workers barely making above minimum wage are spending half the year in the Bahamas. [Note: this paragraph is written from a US perspective.]

"Golden handcuffs" is a similar term. It's not that there is no validity to these notions or that the phenomenon of golden handcuffs doesn't actually occur, because it most certainly does. It's just that, in their typical usage that I see, these terms are used to invent an abstract struggle that upper middle class people are supposedly facing in order to assuage guilt over their own fortune.

[Maxels]

I thought golden handcuffs were typically referring to vesting options in a company.

I know I have friends that don't want to resign themselves to a life of programming/software engineering/whatever you want to call it because they see a ceiling to their compensation, or career path. Theres only so many numbers they can tack on to your title before it becomes meaningless.

[freyr]

I go back and forth on this. There's always a ceiling. For a doctor, banker, corporate lawyer, or salesperson, the ceiling is some multiple higher. But are they better jobs? An MD would require many years of study first, a law degree would burn $100k of your net worth and likely leave you underemployed, you're probably not cut out for sales, and so on.

You really only escape the ceiling going into business for yourself. And there probably has never been a time where it's easier to go into business than the last decade, because of the relatively low cost and high reward of developing software. Maybe that's why programmers are often restless, because the path to wealth seems close at hand (even when it's much harder than it seems, and requires many more skills than just programming).